CityNerd Ray Delahanty brings the goods in the video below, but first some of my own thoughts:
It is easy to do a back of the envelope calculation and see why this will never make any sense. You simply can’t load people into Tesla sedans fast enough to move people in any reasonable volume.
Even then, in order to meet times of peak demand you have to have drivers and vehicles that are idle during non-peak times. The biggest operational cost for transit systems is labor. Not only does the Loop require lots of labor per passenger, it requires lots of labor to be on standby.
With say, bus transit, the bus will be mostly empty during non-peak, but then fill up during peak. In one sense, this is inefficient because most of the time the bus is bigger than it needs to be, but you only need one bus and one driver to handle all the demand. On a per passenger basis, buses load and unload much faster too.
Clearly the plan is that someday the vehicles will be autonomous, but Tesla has not applied for AV ride hailing permits in Clark County or in Nevada, so that day is still a long way away.
When you boil it down, the Loop is just a taxi system running in a dedicated tunnel. So, each trip will need to cost about as much as a conventional taxi. You may get some benefit because of lack of surface traffic, but you have to maintain the tunnel as well.
There’s another theory - that Boring Company doesn’t exist in order to provide any terrestrial services, but rather for the purpose of aiding in the colonization of Mars.
Okay, that sounds a little out there. But Elon Musk has a number of ventures and is really committed to the idea of colonizing Mars, and it’s probably not a coincidence that most of his businesses are in fields solving engineering problems that have to be solved for Mars colonization to happen:
It is sometimes useful to think of all of Elon Musk’s ventures as one big company. I like to call it the Musk Mars Conglomerate, because it seems to be loosely organized around a theme of getting humans to Mars. (SpaceX rockets will take them there, Boring Company will dig tunnels for their habitats, Tesla will build appropriately cyberpunk vehicles to travel around Mars and Twitter/X will, I am not even kidding, be the government.1) Musk’s ventures seem to pretty freely share employees, resources, money and investors; sometimes, when it is convenient, they even merge with one another. There is a rough sense in which they are all one big company, where Musk is the founder, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder, and he gets to allocate resources among them in whatever way he thinks will maximize the overall value.
Digging tunnels is likely to be a very important part of Mars colonization, because that’s a very efficient way of getting lots of habitat space that’s well protected from radiation, temperature fluctuations, and the rather poisonous regolith. So that’s a useful field for Musk Mars Conglomerate to develop engineering expertise in. You could do that just digging tunnels for no reason in random places, of course, but if you can get folks to let you dig those tunnels for some purpose - like getting a questionable but still somewhat operable piece of transportation infrastructure - then sure! Do that!
But I don’t think the transportation uses are the main goal. It’s Mars, baby.
The DisneyWorld monorail started before the one in LasVegas, although after the one in Seattle, and obvioiusly Long after the one in whereveritis, Germany.
Fun fact: the transit system at DisneyWorld is the 10th largest in the US, when including the busses, trams, monorail, and other mass transit vehicles used to shuttle people around.
The one in Seattle was built by Alweg, as was the original Disneyland monorail. Alweg was the force behind straddlebeam monorails. Disney now builds it’s own monorails. iirc, the monorail trains in Vegas are/were at one time retired Disney World trains.
Wuppertal. The Wuppertal system did have it’s shortcomings, like the tracks being exposed to weather. SAFEGE was a French combine that addressed the shortcomings in the Wuppertal system. The monorail used in “451” was a demonstration loop built by SAFEGE.
The monorail at the 1964-65 NY World’s Fair was an AMF, iirc, using a SAFEGE design.
I’m sure that plays into it. But if you want to gain expertise in boring tunnels you need to bore some tunnels, right? At one point, TBC was in talks with a number of different cities, LA, Chicago, Baltimore, etc. They even featured some of these cities on their website. But one by one they all went away. I did see they started talks with Memphis recently, however.
The basic problem is you can’t make transit work with passenger cars unless they are autonomous, and maybe not even then. When transit authorities broke out the adding machines they could see it would never be cost effective.
On top of that, you can’t start off with busses and upgrade later when you develop autonomy because TBC’s tunnels are too narrow for busses.
I suspect TBC’s boring tech is no better than anyone else’s boring tech as well. There is plenty of work boring smaller diameter tunnels for utilities and such. But TBC hasn’t entered that arena at all as far as I know.
The funny thing about that is the expertise in boring tunnels already exists. As a species, we’ve bored all sorts of significant tunnels. The UK - France Chunnel. Boston’s big dig. The San Francisco BART. Los Angeles subways. There’s probably way more than those that have been dug using TBMs in the last few decades. I’m sure doing some digging yourself (by the boring company) would have some benefits in finding improvements. But you don’t have to put stupidly small vehicles in them. That’s where the boring company is likely failing to attract customers. Stick with the digging and reinforcement of the tunnels and let the customer put whatever they want in it, like a train.
The Loop itself is a somewhat interesting idea. But using cars is a terrible idea. Make it an electric train. Or continuously moving vehicles like a people mover.
I remember at the beginning they were crowing about “how much faster” they could make a tunnel than other companies. Then it was pointed out that their tunnels were smaller, meaning there was half as much spoil to take away and half as many supporting rings to install, etc. and suddenly they stopped crowing about that.
However I will say that if they would stop using Teslas and start using something like Amazon’s Zoox, they could probably improve throughput by double.
I note the connector rail at the Atlanta airport is fully automated and seems to work fine. It’s also traditional size for light rail, so probably not the best example. Another I’m familiar with is the automated people mover at Newark Airport which is much smaller, and might lend itself to this sort of thing. But individual passenger cars? No, not likely.
Well, there’s the other theory - that this isn’t transit. That this is simply Tesla building itself its own private roadway network in these cities, and that these private roads will ultimately be used by Tesla’s taxis rather than (primarily) as transit. So looking at it as a transit system is the wrong frame.
The idea is that you’ll be at the airport and just hail a robotaxi from the same place you hail any other taxi, as a taxi. The taxi will then get to dip into the Loop tunnels and avoid all the traffic. They’ll emerge at your hotel (or wherever) and drop you off at the main entrance of the hotel like any other taxi would.
In that frame, all the “bugs” in the video are actually features. The system is designed so that the vehicles surface into general traffic at several of the destinations and have minimal stations - which is terrible for a transit system, but exactly what you want if it’s mostly going to be used by ordinary taxis that aren’t going to a station. It’s just a privately operated “Lexus Lane” network.
This fits in well with the “problems” they’re going to have at their major connections - the airports. The airport authorities aren’t going to let Tesla dig into their facilities and create stations that are actually connected to the terminals, so the tunnel exits are going to be well outside the airport. In Vegas, they’re saying today that the idea is that passengers will exit at the Loop “station” and take shuttles to either the garage or multi-modal center and then a second shuttle to their terminal (and vice versa). See links below. But it makes virtually no sense for the mature system to operate that way, with two additional mode changes. These folks are already in vehicles that can navigate surface roads. That’s just crazy.
So while the critiques levied in the OP are correct if the Loop is really a transit system, they’re just missing the point if it’s just an exclusive private road. Which can make a ton of economic sense even with limited throughput, especially since TBC’s getting all that ROW for free.
They’ll probably maintain the Loop/faux-transit operations for decoration, with bare-bones “stations” and limited numbers of vehicles that are running dedicated routes between them. But the real way to actually make this work is as a private road for Tesla’s taxis to dip in and out of while all the ordinary Joes are sitting in surface traffic.
